a mixed plate of Japanese American news and culture
ROSARIO + VAMPIRE: SEASON II VOL. 1 By Akihisa Ikeda (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2010, 184 pp., $9.99 paperback) School is back in session. “Rosario + Vampire: Season II” is back for its second year. This continuation of the original series starts off with Tsukune Aono returning to Yokai Academy for his second year. All [...]
ARATA: THE LEGEND VOL. 1 By Yuu Watase (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2010, 208 pp., $9.99 paperback) Yuu Watase, the acclaimed author of other manga series such as “Fushigi Yuugi” and “Ayashi no Ceres,” is no stranger to fantasy settings, but “Arata: The Legend” serves as her first foray into comics for boys. In “Arata,” [...]
A DRUNKEN DREAM AND OTHER STORIES By Moto Hagio (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2010, 288 pp., $24.99, hardcover) Moto Hagio is certainly one of the world’s leading artists when it comes to shoujo manga (comics for and about girls). Born in 1949, she is one of “the magnificent forty-niners,” a group of shoujo manga artists that [...]
Fred Schodt is a well-known expert on Japanese popular culture. He was one of the first to write about manga in English, and was Osamu Tezuka’s personal translator for both the man and his comics. His first book, “Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics,” was published in 1983, and is still an invaluable resource [...]
“Crazy + Genuis = Shiga,” wrote Scott McCloud, considered by many to be the foremost authority on comics. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to argue that those two words do not apply to Jason Shiga. A favorite in the indie comics scene for more than a decade, Shiga won renown for his dark humor [...]
With the rising popularity of anime and the subsequent rise in popularity at such anime conventions as Anime Expo and Fanime Con in California, the practice of cosplay became a largely popular activity among fans. Cosplay, a contraction of the words “costume” and “play” is a fan-activity where people dress up as characters from anime, [...]
TOKYO — The popularity of a manga comic titled “One Piece” remains unceasing with the circulation of the latest 56th volume put on sale this month totaling 2.85 million copies, marking the highest number for a first printing in the history of comic publications. The figure brought the total circulation of “One Piece” (featuring a [...]
This past month, Astro Boy, one of Japan’s greatest icons, made his debut in U.S. movie theaters. The new film, appropriately titled “Astro Boy,” is directed by British animator David Bowers (“Flushed Away”) and produced by Hong Kong’s Imagi Studios’ (the CGI-animated “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”) — with some oversight by Tezuka Productions, the company [...]
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